City of Bikes
Went to Cambridge the other day. I live closer to Oxford but I don’t like it. It’s got a lot of the shithole about it. Cambridge actually makes me wish I could turn back time and go to university there. Even as someone with three degrees, I wish I could live in that place and cycle those cobbled streets. It’s an odd feeling for me, because I’d normally poo-poo the whole idea of “Oxbridge” and the so-called education they provide. You can certainly lay at Oxford’s door responsibility for the lightweights and charlatans that have infected our politics for the past several decades. Cambridge doesn’t seem to get quite as much of a look in as the “PPE at Oxford” crowd. Then again, Cambridge probably supplied more traitors.
The thing that strikes the visitor to Cambridge most strongly is the presence of the bicycle. It’s nice and flat, of course, so it’s a perfect city for biking. There are thousands and thousands of bikes parked up everywhere and a fair number of people dinging past you. A lot of beat-up looking bikes, cargo bikes, sit-up-and-beg bikes, classic racers, even the odd e-bike.
It’s lovely, and yet, Cambridge itself offers very little concession to safe cycling. The central streets are cobbled. You can see people having their bones properly rattled as they ride down the street. There are cycle lanes outside the ring road but not inside it, so cycling is not segregated from motor traffic, the way it is in Copenhagen. But it works, simply because the sheer weight of numbers means that drivers just have to give way to cyclists, who take up position in the middle of the lane and stay there. That’s all it takes: if enough people get on their bikes, it doesn’t matter if there are cycle lanes or not.
We used the Park and Ride, of course. Parking at Madingly and taking the bus into town for a mere EIGHT QUID for two people. If we’d been four? SIXTEEN QUID.
I don’t know how you feel about this, but it gives me the rage, not least because we make regular trips to Mulhouse, where Park+Tram costs €2, no matter how many people are in your car. So loaded up with five people: €2. That’s for the parking and the return tram ride. The same five people in Cambridge: TWENTY QUID.
I can see charging someone £20 to park in the town centre. That would be a proper disincentive to take your car into town. But to punish people for doing the right thing? As I said, it gives me the rage.
Anyway, nice place. A lot of Chinese tourists, I noticed. One of them sprayed snot out of his nose onto the street, just in front of my feet. One of the grossest things I’ve ever seen.
Yet Cambridge still gives me that nostalgic feeling, nostalgia for what never was. Even during my undergraduate years at Nottingham University, I didn’t cycle. I always took the bus, or walked. Later on, when I was doing my PhD, I got on my bike. But Nottingham is much more hilly than Cambridge. Anyway, the thing you realise in Cambriidge (and Copenhagen) is this: there is nothing more beautiful than a pretty girl in a summer dress riding a bike. And then you go down by the river and the punt hawkers start hassling you and the whole feeling is shattered. “Punting today? Maybe later? Interested?” Fucking punts. Cunts.